On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, W. Wesley Groleau x4923 wrote, in parts quoting Colin
Paul Gloster:
"> I've just come out of a lecture wherein we were told that Java took the
> good bits from C++ and Smalltalk and Ada. [..]

The lecturer (to be charitable) is misinformed."

He has been incorrect before (e.g. messing up people's minds on TCP header
checksums without the faintest notion that what he's saying is
wrong). From this he might not be misinformed at all but not receptive and
attentive enough to details.

Yesterday he claimed that Java is object based because a Java program must
use classes (sic) but that C++ is object oriented because you can ignore
objects altogether and just use C (sic).

If lecturers and course co-ordinators make students think that Java has
the best features of all remotely comparable languages then most will not
bother to explore the supposedly inferior languages.

"> [..] Someone else at the same
> university told me a few months ago that Ada's OO support is inferior [..]

Inferior to what? Java's OO support has a few things Ada doesn't.
Ada's OO support has a lot of things Java doesn't--and most of these
were in Ada 83!"

Inferior to Java's (and possibly C++'s) implentation(s).

"[..]
> [..] (and he mentioned the implementation of rendezvous in
> Ada as insufficient).

Insufficient for what? And does he propose an alternative?"

I do not believe I pressed him on this and I spoke to him only once
(months ago) but he was saying that Ada's rendezvous is not fully what he
deems proper. Perhaps specifically that it is not proper rendezvous. His
alternative is to use Java.

"Perhaps he means that Ada 95 added protected types because the rendezvous
of Ada 83 was not enough."

I doubt that this accurately matches his train of thought during that
conversation.

"[..] Or perhaps he is displeased that Ada provided the rendezvous as a
single boring language feature instead of a collection of low-level
library calls that give the programmer the chance to prove how clever he
is. (Which more often results in the programmer proving he can forget
details just as well as any other human.)"

He was not bothered by Ada at all. He happily said that Java will soon be
far more important than C++; FORTRAN; and Ada.